BOBBY
MOORE
By The Person Who Knew Him Best
TINA MOORE

Copyright

HarperSport an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperSport 2006

© Tina Moore 2006

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN:9780007378661

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

1. Hero

2. Wilde Women

3. When Bobby Met Tina

4. And Big Mal Came Too

5. A Light Grey

6. Happy Days

7. Green Fire, White Lace

8. Naughty Boy

9. A Long Way From Christchurch Road

10. A Touch of Brian

11. Calling Time

12. Extra Time

13. The Job That Never Was

14. Lost in Translation

15. Who Was That Woman?

16. Not-So-Sweet Carolina

17. Brief Encounter

18. Poppy Days

19. Is That Bobby Moore?

20. Absent Fathers

21. The Magnolia Tree

Afterword

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgements

About the Publishers

Foreword
BY JIMMY TARBUCK

In the words of his adoring West Ham fans, Bobby Moore was a ‘top geezer’.

The fact that he left us at fifty-one years of age is downright unfair. His memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey - how fitting for the best England captain we have ever had and for us all to say goodbye to our national hero. It was a wonderful service. Franz Beckenbauer read a lesson and then it was my turn. I have never been so nervous in my life. I opened up with, ‘I usually say it’s nice to be here, but on this particular day it certainly isn’t.’

What I thought happened was that God had arranged a football match in heaven and had said to St Peter, ‘Get me the best captain.’ That, without doubt, was Bobby Moore.

He was a total gentleman and a very fair man, both on and off the pitch. He was a terrific companion who could have won the World Lager Drinking Championship three years running. He was totally let down by those small, envious men who controlled football on a national basis in those days. He was never once offered a job, a position as a football ambassador or just representing the England team. It was, and still is, a bloody disgrace. He deserved so much more from life. What a great Minister of Sport he would have made.

I once asked Pele about him. He said that Bobby wasn’t a friend, he was a brother. After all these years I still can’t believe that he’s gone and the phone is not going to ring and that voice at the other end will say, ‘Hello, Jimbo, all well?’ His sense of humour and his companionship and him just being Bobby Moore - oh, I do miss him.

CHAPTER ONE
Hero

Here’s my Bobby now. Head up, sunlight on blond curls. He’s been out there for nearly two hours but he looks so elegant and calm he might just have stepped onto the pitch.

He’s chesting the ball down. A short pass to Bailie, who passes it back, socks down around his ankles. Bobby looks up. Where to now?

I can feel Judith Hurst’s fingers tighten on my arm. Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of Geoff, exhausted but still instinctively heading for the German goal.

Oh Bobby, don’t risk it. Big Jack Charlton’s screaming at you. No one can hear what he’s saying, all we can see is his Adam’s apple wobbling, but it’s what we’re all thinking. We’re 3-2 up! We’re in the final minute! Kick the % *#$ thing into the stands!

Judith and I are clinging to each other, the way we’ve done for most of the game. Every conceivable emotion has been wrung out of us - pride, rapture, excitement, despair, euphoria, disbelief, hope, agony, exhilaration. We clenched our fists in anticipation when Martin Peters scored with twelve minutes to go. We plunged our heads in our hands when the Germans equalized with just moments of normal time remaining.

We watched the shot from Geoff bounce in off the crossbar in extra time. Or did it hit the underside and bounce out again? Wasn’t it a goal after all? Judith was shouting, ‘It’s in, it’s in!’ and I was backing her up with, ‘Oh yes, it’s in!’ The German supporters behind us were shouting back, ‘No it isn’t!’ We must have sounded like the audience at a panto. But it was all right. Goal given. 3-2.

The World Cup is nearly ours.

Now the German supporters have fallen silent. A few seconds of tension seem like an eternity. Bobby finds Geoff, running way upfield, with the perfect ball. People start running onto the pitch. In living rooms all over the land Kenneth Wolstenholme is telling the nation, ‘They think it’s all over . . .’

Geoff’s puffing out his cheeks, the way he always does when he shoots. The ball lands in the net. And to continue with those words of Kenneth Wolstenholme, which I think everyone in England must know by heart,’. . . It is now.’

There’s too much noise to hear the final whistle, but around me is an explosion of delirious joy. I just sit in silence for a few seconds. I’m drained, physically and emotionally. The roller coaster of the last eighteen months that Bobby and I have lived through, the public adulation and success, the private terror and uncertainty, have suddenly got to me. I can’t take this in.

I don’t stay still for long, though. Judith and I are out of our seats, hugging each other. I think of Doss, Bobby’s mother, who’s spent every game of the tournament pottering around the garden because she can’t bear the suspense of watching Bobby. Now she’ll be so proud and overjoyed.

Bobby climbs the steps. He glances at the Queen’s lilywhite gloves and carefully wipes his sweaty, muddy palms on his shorts then dries them on the velvet balustrade before receiving the trophy. I can’t help smiling. It’s such an elaborately thoughtful gesture, so typical of Bobby. Mr Perfect.

And when he holds up the cup, I cry. Not out of happiness because England have won but because of what he’s been through to be standing here today with the Jules Rimet Trophy in his hands. Watching him being carried round on his team-mates’ shoulders, I just think how magnificent he is. Here’s someone who, only a year and a half before, unknown to all but half a dozen people, has undergone a terrible ordeal with cancer and overcome it. Now he’s every schoolboy’s hero, holding up the World Cup. To me, that’s the real magic of the day. What a man.

The thirtieth of July 1966 must be a date branded on every English person’s memory for all time. Even people who weren’t born then know about the day we won the World Cup. It’s part of British history. It was a unique occasion. Even if we won it again (wouldn’t it be great?), the boys of summer 1966 will always have a special place in everyone’s hearts. They were the first.

When I think back on that time, the sun always seems to be shining in my mind’s eye, although in fact it rained on the afternoon of the Final. It must be something to do with the era in which it took place. The Boys of ‘66 were part of the fabric of the Sixties: Swinging London, the Harold Wilson government, student protests, flower power, the Beatles and the Stones, white boots and mini-skirts, Biba and Mary Quant. It was a gorgeous, glorious time when the whole of Britain seemed youthful, successful and optimistic.

As Judith Hurst and I were driven in an England bus with the rest of the wives past the throngs of people in Wembley Way that day, we felt so proud and full of expectation. And the first people we saw when we took our seats were Terence Stamp and Jean Shrimpton, who was probably the face of the Sixties. She looked so glamorous, absolutely stunning. I had done a little modelling for a couple of catalogues but I just wasn’t in her orbit. She was the real thing. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She just stood out.

The build-up to the Final had been overwhelming. Wherever you went, it was all anyone talked about, but I could still hardly believe what was happening to us. Yes, it was a time when the class system was breaking down and people from ordinary backgrounds like us were beginning to become cultural icons. And yes, Bobby had already become football’s first pin-up - Terry O’Neill’s photo of him, surrounded by models, had appeared in an edition of Vogue in 1962. Not only that - he had just graced the fashion pages of the Daily Express, kicking a ball in a Hardy Amies suit. But this was something else again. Before the World Cup, I’d been able for the most part to go about with my family in anonymity. But in those weeks leading up to the Final I had my first taste of what it meant to be a celebrity, just for being married to a footballer.

I was being recognized in Bond Street. Shops would loan me designer clothes. Alfie Isaacs, a huge West Ham fan who owned an upmarket dress shop, gave me the outfit I wore on Final night - yellow silk chiffon with a flared skirt and a beaded top that I teamed with a tourmaline mink stole. Alfie had arranged for the photographers to be there when I tried it on and they followed me as I skipped up the road on a shopping spree. I caught sight of Alfie peering anxiously at me from round the corner, worrying that his ensemble was going to be upstaged.

Taxi drivers wouldn’t charge fares. I discovered I could ring up a restaurant and say, ‘Tina Moore here, can I have a table?’ and the answer was never ‘No’. Ford gave us a white Escort, although as it had World Cup Willie, a cartoon character, on the side, it wasn’t the kind of vehicle you went anywhere in if you were trying to cultivate an impression of dignity. But let’s be honest, we were having the time of our lives. Loads of doors opened for us because of Bobby’s fame. I realized we were of value. A lot of it was hype and nonsense and I hadn’t expected it, but it was great.

The point I’m making is that suddenly, for the first time ever, the game wasn’t just something stuck at the back of the newspapers. Football had married fashion and now it was feature page material as well. In March that year, Terry O’Neill had taken some fabulous shots of Bobby and me, including one of me leaning against a tree in Epping Forest, wearing thigh-high boots and an England shirt as a mini-dress, while Bobby knelt at my feet wearing drainpipes and a black polo-neck. If we hadn’t known it before, we knew it then - we were Bobby and Tina, the First Couple of football.

My picture also found its way into the Sun, where it formed part of a collection called ‘Ten of the Best-Looking Women in England’, probably because someone thought I looked a bit like Joyce Hopkirk; we both had long, blonde hair. There the similarity ended: she was the editor of Cosmo magazine and one of the most powerful, glamorous women in Fleet Street, while I was a Gants Hill housewife. And I hasten to say that it was a terrifically flattering photo of me - when I first saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, she looks good’ and carried on turning the pages. I hadn’t recognized myself.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t some new, unique star in the firmament - Tina Moore, footballer’s wife extraordinaire. It wasn’t just me on whom the press were focussing. All the players’ families found themselves to be of intense media interest. Martin Peters, Geoff Hurst and Bobby, the three West Ham players in the England side, all lived close by each other in suburban Essex and there were photoshoots in our back gardens, with toddlers crawling around our feet. Pictures of the girls of 1966 appeared in The Sunday Times - elegant Norma Charlton, pretty, coltish Lesley Ball, the lovely, warm Judith Hurst and tall, dark-haired Kathy Peters, looking haughty and Vogue-ish in her miniskirt. In actual fact, the real-life Kathy was one of the least haughty people you could ever meet. She had the most tremendous sense of fun. That girl was a real laugh.

I suppose, in a way, we were the prototype Footballers’ Wives, but rather than being singers and models and celebrities in our own right, we were ordinary girls from ordinary backgrounds who only surfaced in the glare of publicity because we were married to the players. There was no pretentiousness or ostentation. Nobody was trying to cut anyone else out. There wasn’t a big hairdo amongst us and we would have died rather than do anything that led to accusations of being flighty.

Really, we were girls of our time. We’d been brought up to respect our elders and betters and we certainly weren’t swept away by our own importance. Set foot on the pitch or in the boardroom? We’d never have dared. At matches, the wives and girlfriends were always contained in a separate tea room, so if any of us harboured delusions of grandeur we soon got the message - we were of no consequence whatsoever!

For instance, on the evening of the World Cup Final there was a celebration dinner at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington High Street. Everyone was there: players and officials of the four semi-finalists, the World Cup organizing committee, the upper ranks of the Football Association. Everyone but the wives. The banquet was stag. In that era, not one of us found that at all remarkable and if Alf Ramsey said, ‘No wives’, then that was how it had to be. There was a wide gulf between managers and players in those days and not one of them would have questioned his decision. In our day we always did what we were told to do.

So we wives were herded into the Bulldog Chophouse in another part of the hotel. The only women allowed into the banquet were the official photographer, Sally Lombard, and her two assistants. One was Estelle Lombard, Sally’s niece. The other was Betty Wilde - who just happened to be my mother.

The explanation? Sally Lombard’s company, Jalmar, held the photographic concession at all the top London hotels. My mother was no photographer, but she and Sally were great, great friends. They went way back. As soon as it looked as if England would make the Final, the two of them hatched the idea between them. My mother kept it a tightly-guarded secret and Bobby and I were both astonished when she told us. What a coup! I wasn’t jealous - far from it. I thought my mother was brilliant to have got herself in.

I didn’t manage to set eyes on Bobby until around midnight, when photographers got us together for a picture on the roof terrace. Normally about as hot-headed as a snowman, that night he was a different man, wild with happiness and excitement, just radiating joy. The trophy was in his hands and I’m not sure who got kissed the more passionately, me or Jules Rimet.

As we left the hotel, I gasped - thousands of people were waiting outside just to get a glimpse of him. Bobby was so moved that he actually couldn’t speak. As for me, that was the moment when it really sank in how much he meant to the fans. Forget the Prime Minister and Prince Charles, forget John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. That night, Bobby was the most famous man in England.

It was a real shame that there wasn’t a party laid on for the lads and the wives and girlfriends. It would have been lovely to celebrate together. Instead we all split up, with Bobby and I and a couple of the others heading for the Playboy Club. When we arrived everybody stood up and applauded. The atmosphere was just fizzing with electricity. Burt Bacharach was there with Victor Lownes, who ran the club and was Hugh Hefner’s business partner, and he asked Victor to introduce him to Bobby. All the bunny girls were crowding round taking pictures. It ended up with Bobby on stage singing Stevie Wonder’s ‘One, two, three’ -with hindsight, perhaps Geoff Hurst, the hat-trick hero, should have been up there singing that. And I had a song dedicated to me as well - ‘My Cherie Amour’. What a fantastic night.

We got back to the hotel at around 3 am and tumbled into bed, dazed with happiness and triumph. The next day everyone went to the ATV studios, where the team appeared on a show hosted by Eamonn Andrews, and after that we went back to our house in Gants Hill on the eastern outskirts of London. It was our first marital home and cost £3,850. We’d started saving up for it the minute we got engaged at Christmas 1960.

Everyone came to terms with the events of the weekend in their different ways. Geoff Hurst mowed the lawn, then washed his car, the same as he did every Sunday afternoon. Martin and Kathy Peters had gone home early after the banquet because they had just bought a new house and Kathy had dealt with the move on her own while Martin was away with the England squad preparing for the World Cup.

Jack Charlton, several sheets to the wind, famously woke up in a sitting room in Leytonstone, having spent the night on the sofa of a complete stranger. When he tottered outside the next morning, a Geordie voice said, ‘Hello, Jack!’ from over the garden fence. It was a lady from his home town of Ashington, down in London for the weekend to visit relatives.

And the most celebrated man in England and his wife? With our heads still in the clouds, we held a party for our friends and re-lived the day. But after the guests had gone, everything just felt a bit flat, to be honest. Bobby poured himself a lager and tried to settle down to watch television, while I cleared up the glasses and looked back on the last eight weeks.

I’d loved every minute of it, of course I had. It had been heady and exhilarating, but a bit crazy, too. And with Bobby away with the team most of the time, I hadn’t been able to share the fun with him. Now we were back to normality. It was time to come down off the clouds, I thought. I didn’t know whether I felt relieved or bereft. Both, perhaps.

Whatever I thought normality was, we weren’t back to it for long. I realized that when the telegram dropped onto the doormat a few days after the Final. It gave a date, followed by the message: PARTY STOP WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOU STOP LIONEL BART.

We were really excited and nervous. When we asked around, we found it was going to be a real showbiz party, so I went out to buy a new dress. It was green lace and knee-length. On the day I had my hair done specially, with a hairpiece that fixed on with an Alice band. Confident that I truly looked the part, I set off with Bobby to Lionel Bart’s house.

It was wonderful. I’d never been inside anything like it. The walls and ceiling of the guests’ cloakroom were all mirrored and the loo itself was set in a huge golden chair. You really could claim to be ‘on the throne’! Bobby and I were shown into a room full of guests. It was like walking into a photograph of a cross-section of Sixties glitterati.

Bobby and I weren’t complete hicks. We were living in an age when working-class people were starting to make a lot of money in fashion and showbiz. Football was part of their roots, so naturally he was one of their heroes. We’d already started to rub shoulders with some of his up-and-coming East London contemporaries - Terence Stamp, who came from Plaistow, the same stamping ground as Martin Peters, was one of his drinking buddies, and Kenny Lynch, the entertainer, had been a mate ever since they’d met at the Ilford Palais, in the days when Bobby was captain of England Schoolboys.

Then there was Dougie Hayward, the so-called ‘celebrity tailor’ in Mount Street, Mayfair. Dougie, who made suits for Michael Caine, Tony Curtis, Peter Sellers, Kirk Douglas and the racing driver Jackie Stewart among others, was another East End boy who was mad about football. I bought Bobby one of his bespoke green velvet smoking jackets.

Johnny Haynes, the last England captain but one before Bobby, had introduced us to the White Elephant, a private dining club in Curzon Street; it had been a favourite haunt of ours for a long time because Bobby was never interrupted by autograph-hunters there and we could enjoy a night out undisturbed. Because it attracted all the main stars of the time, we’d met Robert Mitchum, Sonny and Cher, and Sammy Davis Junior.

But this wasn’t an exclusive club we were in; it was a celebrity’s home. I quickly took in the presence of Tom Jones, Joan Collins, Anthony Newley, Alma Cogan, some of The Who, one of the Stones. The odd thing was that they were all sitting on the floor, though after a while I spotted an empty chair. By then, Bobby and I had had a couple of glasses of champagne for Dutch courage, so I clambered across all these famous people and sat down in it.

I had Joan Collins sitting on the floor on one side of me and Anthony Newley, her then husband, on the other.

‘Who is she?’ Joan Collins whispered to Anthony Newley as she looked up at me.

‘I don’t know,’ said Anthony Newley, ‘but I think she’s sweet.’

The penny dropped. ‘I’m not meant to be here,’ I thought, and tripped back to where I’d come from. I had suddenly realized that the throne might have been in the loo but the chair was the next best thing, and the king who was meant to sit on it was Bobby.

Bobby was the son of a gas-fitter and I’d been a junior secretary at Prudential Assurance. We’d always been in awe of these celebrities, but as far as they were concerned it was Bobby who was the star. As I looked around, watching them all queuing up to shake his hand, I studied what Joan Collins was wearing - a crocheted mini-dress and Courrèges boots, under one of those angled Mary Quant bobs.

‘That’s the last time anyone ever catches me in a knee-length dress and false hairpiece,’ I thought. ‘This is it. The big time. From now on, it’s sink or swim.’

A few weeks later, I was faced with the choice of sinking or swimming again but this time literally. The government of Malta had invited Bobby and me to visit the island as representatives of the World Cup winning squad and we set off in great spirits, excited about seeing Malta and the neighbouring island of Gozo. Met by a tumultuous welcome, we felt close to achieving Royal status as we were taken on an open-topped motorcade tour of the local stadium.

That was where the problems started. Before the trip, inspired no doubt by my close proximity to Joan Collins, I’d had my blonde locks cut short at Vidal Sassoon. It was a disaster! I hated my new geometric hairstyle so much that I invested in a long blonde wig. It made me feel more like myself, but by the time we were roaring around Malta in the motorcade, it was shifting in the breeze and I wasn’t feeling very optimistic about its future prospects.

The wandering wig set the tone of a trip that had us alternating between shuffling exhaustion and convulsions of laughter. We had a very tight schedule and although the Maltese people were fantastically warm and hospitable, we were finding things very draining. Bobby only had to appear at the window of our hotel room in the mornings to be greeted with cheers and applause for, as he put it, ‘the great feat of opening the curtains’.

So we were very grateful when they gave us one afternoon’s rest, which allowed us to spend some time on a local businessman’s yacht. The weather was gorgeous and we were offered the chance to water-ski. I had to refuse the invitation in case the blonde wig went walkabout, which was quite galling, although we did get to go on a speedboat and with the help of a red scarf I managed to keep my hair on. At the end of a fabulous afternoon, the speedboat bore us back to port where we were due to meet a prominent Maltese monsignor and a couple of government ministers.

It so happened that the day before our yacht visit, Bobby and I had run into Mike Winters, one half of the Mike and Bernie Winters comedy duo, and his wife, Cassie. They were holidaying out there. Cassie, who was heavily pregnant, turned out to be not just a lovely person but a real character. Not only that, but she must have been psychic as well. Her parting shot to me was, ‘I’ve got a feeling about you. You’re going to be front page news one day.’

In fact, her prophecy was proved right a little bit quicker than that. Within forty-eight hours the front page of The Maltese Times was carrying huge banner headlines saying: MONSIGNOR AND MRS BOBBY MOORE IN SEA DRAMA.

What happened was this. As our speedboat reached the shore, a gangplank was extended for us to climb off. Very gingerly I stepped onto it. At that moment there was a slight swell and I grabbed at the bishop’s extended hand. It caught him off guard. Over my shoulder went one priest. As he went flying towards the water, the Minister of Sport tried to catch hold of him and fell in with him. With me already on the gangplank and Bobby about to step onto it, the boat rocked, the gangplank gave way and we went into the briny too.

It gets worse. The wig which I’d so carefully guarded all day was soaked and dyed red from the scarf. I must have looked like a victim of a shark attack, especially as my knees and shins were grazed and bleeding. I was wearing a navy crepe mini-dress and that was up to a daring new high, so it was just as well the monsignor’s glasses had fallen off and sunk to the bottom.

BOBBY MOORE IN HEROIC SEA RESCUE ATTEMPT? No way. He was far too busy desperately trying not to crack up with laughter, in case he hurt anyone’s feelings. But the funniest thing was what my mother -ever my publicist - said when a reporter rang up for her reaction: ‘Oh, I’m sure Tina’s all right. She’s a very strong swimmer.’

I was in the Cipriani restaurant recently, chatting with my friend Marilyn Cole, the British Playboy bunny who became Playmate of the Year, and we were talking about England’s 2004 European Championship defeat by Portugal. I can’t imagine that forty years ago a glamorous woman like Marilyn Cole would have been discussing whether a divot had caused David Beckham to miss a penalty.

It’s different now. Can you imagine the World Cup winning captain of England going back to his Essex semi to sip lager and watch TV? Can you imagine the hat-trick hero being able to wash the car outside his house the next day without being mobbed?

There’s no way today’s up-and-coming football apprentice would have to bump up his pay by working as a labourer. Bobby did. In his teens he had a summer job at William Warnes, the factory where his mother worked. As it happens, that job and the chores he had to perform as a colt for West Ham - sweeping the stands and rolling the grass - were things he liked doing because they built him up; although he had strong thighs like tree trunks, his arms were like twigs. I think he knew he had the makings of an Adonis!

That Saturday in July 1966 changed everything. The minute Bobby held up that trophy at Wembley, football was never going to be just a sport any more. It wasn’t only the fact that England won, either. There was something about Bobby himself, his blond good looks, his style, the way he carried himself. You don’t often hear a man described as beautiful, but that’s what Bobby was. He looked like a young god - one who happened to play football.

He was a complicated young god. As a husband and father he was warm and loving. As a player he was cool and undemonstrative. His temper was so controlled and his tackling so accurate that he was almost never booked. He had a ruthless, calculating streak - if someone hurt him in a tackle, he would never react in the heat of the moment, but store it up for later and make his point when the time was right. To have that icy self-control turned against you was devastating, as one day I would discover. But those qualities were part of what made him the great England captain we all so admired.

Bobby and I were the first to experience the good and the bad of post-1966 football. We bought the dream house and lived the fabulous lifestyle. We were courted by Prime Ministers and befriended by celebrities. We had to cope with the glare of the media and the tensions which that caused in our marriage. We had kidnap threats to our children. All firsts.

Bobby’s bonus for being part of the World Cup winning side was £1,000. Now that seems like a pittance, but in any case to him that wasn’t what it was about. It was about putting on that shirt with the three lions on the chest and hearing the roar of expectancy when he led the team out of the tunnel. Some kind of charge went through him the moment he put on that shirt. He seemed to turn into a lion himself.

I can see him now, the ball resting on his hip. Then he’d knock it into the air with the back of his hand before breaking into a jog, running with those little short steps and holding down the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt with his fingers.

He was so proud of being an England player. He liked the fame, he loved the big crowd and above all he believed in his country. He showed it by the way he played. I think that’s why he’s remembered with such love and why so many people continue to look on him as the greatest English footballer there has ever been.

CHAPTER TWO
Wilde Women

If my mother and I hadn’t been riding in a taxi along Ilford High Street that day in 1958, perhaps my life would have turned out very differently. Perhaps Bobby would have given up hanging around the local shops in the hope of catching sight of me. Perhaps he would have met another nice girl at the Ilford Palais and someone else entirely would have ended up with Judith Hurst clutching her arm at Wembley on 30 July 1966. Perhaps . . . But I’d better begin at the beginning.

My mother’s name was Elizabeth Wilde, although everyone knew her as Betty. She was that rare combination - a woman who was beautiful and funny. We’d walk down the road together and men would whistle at her, not me. Even when she was in her late forties, they admired her. After Bobby and I were married, Bill Larkin, a wealthy West Ham fan, would regularly inform me that while I was a good-looking woman, ‘You’re not a patch on your mum yet.’

She definitely wasn’t the average mother. For a start, she was a great cook - almost unique among post-war British housewives. But much more than that, she was one of those people you were drawn to in a crowded room. She had a zest for life and a strong sense of comedy and you wanted to bask in her warmth.

She was also incredibly wise and a tremendous listener. That’s probably how, later on, she came to be a friend and a bit of a mother confessor to the West Ham lads. They’d go and talk to her for ages in the sports shop that in due course she ran for Bobby opposite the West Ham ground. Sometimes Bobby would invite her to join some of the players and go to the pub after training or a reserves game. They enjoyed her company and considered her to be one of them - she was an honorary lad. Quite a compliment, I felt. I was so proud of her.

I’ve always had the feeling that the moment she saw Bobby, she knew he would be right for me and decided she’d do everything she could to get us together. Life hadn’t been all that easy for her. She’d always had to work for her living, because she and my father split up when I was two. After she died, one of her friends said to me, ‘She was a film star. An absolute film star. She was absolutely stunning. And she had the most disastrous taste in men.’

Her friend got it exactly right. The three most important men in her life let her down badly in one way or another. I think that’s why she was so keen to bring Bobby and me together. She was determined I wasn’t going to make the mistakes she had made. It was my mother who saw how sweet and loving Bobby was to me and how much in love he was. I think she saw all the good qualities he had that perhaps I didn’t discern at first. She could see that he was well-mannered, decent and courteous, as well as good-looking. She loved him and he loved her. When he and I started going out together, I sometimes teased her by saying that I thought she loved Bobby more than I did. I think he was a little bit in love with her, too.

I grew up in Ilford, a small, busy Essex town on the edge of East London. Ilford wasn’t that far from Bobby’s home town of Barking, but it was definitely regarded as a cut above socially, being quite middle-class and Tory. In those days its long High Street was looked on as a notable shopping Mecca and halfway along it was the boy-meets-girl factory, dance hall and theatre of Saturday night dreams, the Palais-de-Danse, where Bobby and I first set eyes on each other.

My first home was a semi in Christchurch Road. The house had two floors and my mother and I lived in the downstairs part. There was no need to separate the house into flats because it was all in the family - upstairs lived Aunt Molly, Uncle Jim and their three children, Jimmy, Marlene and Jenny. Jenny was three years younger than me and more like a little sister than a cousin. My mother’s family were evacuated to Cornwall during the war but as my father had gone riding off into the sunset and my mother needed to be the breadwinner, Molly was summoned back from the West Country to be my childminder. It was a very female-dominated environment. After my father left, it was a long time before my mother had another serious relationship. She was the driving force in my life and I grew up without much experience of men’s ways.

Our part of the house had a large living room at the front, with a smaller room behind it which served as my bedroom. If you went down a step and turned right, you’d find yourself in the scullery. You turned left for the cellar or went through to another large room with French doors that opened onto the garden. That was my mother’s room. Once I started school I was a latchkey kid. If I couldn’t reach it through the front door I’d have to climb in through the coalhole.

We had our own loo (outside), but the bathroom upstairs belonged to Aunt Molly and Uncle Jim. My mother and I went upstairs for a bath once a week and on the other days we made do with sitting in a tin bath for a good wash down - a chore because of all the heating up of kettles that had to take place. When it wasn’t in use, the tin bath hung from a nail against the outside wall. Occasionally we couldn’t face all the bother of getting it down and setting it up and took ourselves off instead to Ilford Baths. I can still remember those shouts of, ‘More hot for Number Six!’

I don’t want to leave the impression that I had a deprived childhood. It never felt like that at all. I was surrounded with love, tolerance and affection, so who cared if the place didn’t boast ‘all mod cons’? I remember my years in Christchurch Road as full of laughs and a lot of fun. I had good manners and politeness drummed into me gently but firmly, as well as the lesson that luxuries were there to be appreciated, not expected as a matter of course. I was a well brought up girl!

It wasn’t as if it was anything out of the ordinary in those early post-war years. My friend Pat Booth, the author, photographer and former model whom I admire very much and who grew up a few streets away from Bobby, lived above a pie and mash shop. They had an outside loo, too, and a guard dog so scary that she would grab two pies whenever she went out there. One was to throw at the dog to distract it when she was leaving, and the other to throw at it so she could get back through the door unscathed on the return journey.

My mother was incredibly protective of me. One day, while I was taking a short cut through Valentine’s Park on the way to school, a man flashed at me. I reported the incident to the park keeper, who promptly summoned the police. They asked me to tell them what happened, saying, ‘Describe the man, not the implement.’ When my mother arrived to collect me, she was as furious with me as if I’d committed an offence myself. ‘It’s boarding school for you,’ she said. Of course, I got round her. I could twist her round my little finger. I realize now that she was frightened. I was 11 or 12 at the time and just starting to bloom. It must have been so difficult for her, having to keep me safe without my father around to share the responsibility.

Although money was tight, we were always very well dressed. This was thanks to a shop in Ilford High Road called Helene, which specialized in designer names. The great thing about Helene was that you could buy everything on something called ‘the weekly’, a kind of pay-as-you-wear scheme, and my mother never looked anything but smart and beautifully turned out.

I think some women felt jealous of her, in fact. For example, there was Mrs Marshall, who lived down our road with her two children, Vinnie and Bea. I used to go and play with them. Mrs Marshall was the kind of woman who would put butter on her own bread and give the children margarine, and she was teeth-grindingly envious of my mother’s glamour. My mother had a hairpiece that was for special occasions - in that era it was called a switch. She would regularly wash it and peg it on the line to dry. One day when I was round at Vinnie’s, he announced, ‘My mum saw your mum’s hair hanging on the line.’

‘You liar,’ I said, ‘it was a yellow duster’, and gave him a specially hard slap. I used to hit him quite a lot anyway, but that day he really got it. No way would he be spreading any more rumours about my mother, that was for sure.

When we became the only house in Christchurch Road with television, we were the talk of the street and the star attraction. The screen was eight inches wide and had a magnifying glass strapped to it. The Marshalls and all the other children in the road used to stand on the window sill to look at it and when the show was ready to begin, Jenny and I would part the lace curtains.

In fact, it was a wonder that we didn’t charge them. That was what we did with the kids who came to watch the shows Jenny and I put on in the back garden. I was the ringmaster and Jenny the very bossed-about entertainer. When she became fed up of jumping through hoops, the family dog would be dressed up and brought in as her understudy. Meanwhile, Jenny would be made to hang by her knees from the laburnum tree - the highlight of the show. I was in charge of magic tricks.

Jenny and I used to ride on the horse-drawn milkman’s float, too. We sat up top with the milkman, so it was a great treat to be selected to help. When the rag-and-bone man was on his rounds, we would ask all the neighbours to give us their old clothes because that would qualify us for a goldfish each. The two of us also used to sneak out and have midnight feasts with the other children in the street. You just couldn’t do that sort of thing now. It was a fantastic childhood, despite the lack of money.

Jenny’s mother, Aunt Molly, was known to me as Auntie Mum. I can’t have been the easiest child to look after. Probably because my mother felt so guilty about going out to work and leaving me, she wouldn’t allow Auntie Mum to discipline me and I used to do naughty things like throw the other children’s toys downstairs. I was just like the girl in the nursery rhyme: ‘When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.’

In my defence, all I can say is that I missed my mother. Auntie Mum was sweet, soft, kind and easy-going and I adored her, but all the same I was acutely aware that my three cousins had their mother around all day to look after them and I didn’t have mine. The highlight of my day was waiting for her to come home.

I was so possessive about her that I didn’t like her boyfriend Joe at all. He was quite rich and must have had a few contacts in the black market - not only was he a reliable source of silk stockings but we were treated to a constant supply of eggs, butter and sugar, all luxuries at the time. Something else we never went short of was smoked salmon. I even had it in the sandwiches I took to school. In the end I got so bored with smoked salmon sandwiches that I’d go round swapping them for ones made with jam.

In many ways she had a sad time, my mother. I think Joe was really the love of her life, but although he claimed to be separated from his wife, he never committed. She was a real beauty and a lively, bright, talented woman, but she got a lot less than she deserved. She was a blonde and looked like Virginia Mayo, a Hollywood star of the Forties and Fifties. She wore her hair drawn back into a French pleat, which showed off her classic features, and she always had an air of elegance. My grandmother, Nanny Wilde, used to say she was the flower of the flock - and it was a pretty big flock. My mother was one of seven children, five of whom were girls. She wasn’t short of brains and when she was 11 she won a scholarship to high school, but she wasn’t allowed to take it up. My grandmother said it wouldn’t be fair on her sisters.

It was Uncle Jim, my mother’s brother, who was Nanny Wilde’s favourite. He and my Aunt Glad held the European professional title for ballroom dancing. That was quite something. Jim owned a dance hall, the Princes, in Barking; coincidentally, it wasn’t far from Waverley Gardens, where Bobby grew up. Nanny Wilde ran the cafe at the back.

In those days, the Forties and early Fifties, ballroom dancing was huge. No one had TV then, of course, so everyone made their own entertainment by going out to dances and music halls. There was no such thing as a couch potato then. When my mother was in her teens, she was a very good dancer. People reckoned she had the ability to be even better than Jim and she was selected to appear in a talent show. She would have earned 2s. 6d. a week - not a sum to be sneered at sixty years ago - but Nanny Wilde put a stop to that, too.

Why? I can only speculate. My grandmother was an old-fashioned matriarch, a bit of a tyrant. She was a very powerful woman who ruled with an iron fist, and she was tough. She probably had to be, with seven children. She was such a strong personality that she seemed almost to obliterate my grandfather. Pop Wilde had a bowler hat and a walking stick and that’s just about all I remember of him.

The Wilde household lived ‘round the corner’, to use East London parlance. In actual fact they were a bit further away than that, in a large detached house in Cranbrook Road, Gants Hill. It had a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden and a marvellous lilac tree in the back. But everyone you knew used to live ‘round the corner’ if they didn’t live ‘over the road’.

There wasn’t only Nanny, Pop and the kids. Archie, the lodger, was part of the equation as well. It was rumoured that the two youngest of the Wildes - my mother and her sister, Eileen - were Archie’s, not Pop’s. It’s certainly true that Eileen didn’t look anything like Pop and if the rumours are to be believed, that might explain why Nanny was tough on my mother - she might have reminded her of her indiscretion.

I’ve got to say that Nanny Wilde was never tough on me - it was only my mother with whom she had the difficult relationship. I’d go round there frequently and listen as she played the piano and sang. She was very family-orientated and I adored her. It was being so family-orientated that got Nanny Wilde into trouble one night at the dance hall, a night so dreadful that for years we could hardly bear to speak of it.

The biggest dance event of the year, the Star Championships, was held up in London and Uncle Jim and Aunt Glad were favourites to win it. The whole family dressed up to the nines to go and watch. My mother even went to the furriers and borrowed two coats on approval for her and Nanny Wilde. It was all heady and exciting stuff and by the time Jim and Glad finished doing their routine, Nanny Wilde had had a few drinks. She swept up to one of the woman judges, pointed to her earrings and told her that she would look better in a different pair.

Unfortunately, the judge had a sense of humour failure, construed the earrings remark as attempted bribery and marched off to report Nanny Wilde to the powers that be. Shortly afterwards, it was announced over the tannoy that Glad and Jim had been disqualified. Oh, the shame of it. And the fur coats had to go back the next day. It was a nightmare!

I think what really drove a wedge between my mother and Nanny Wilde was that she, Betty, was a modern girl - ahead of her time, a bit wilful, perhaps. By the time she was 17 she was virtually living away from home, staying with the family of Gladys Mogford, her best friend. The Mogfords loved her, almost as if she was their own. And I think that in the end she decided to get married, even though she was very young, rather than go home. She just got out.

I know she loved my father, but getting married was really an escape route from her unhappiness. The only trouble was, what she escaped into turned out to be no better than what she’d left behind. My father left her for another blonde when I was very little. After that there was Joe, with his half-truths and broken promises. When I was 12, she got married again, to a ship’s chef called Eddie, but that didn’t work out either.

She’d had so many disappointments and frustrated ambitions that she projected her dreams onto me. She definitely believed I was destined for greater things. I was groomed and always beautifully turned out. Because she didn’t want me to be a gorblimey Cockney, I was sent to elocution lessons. I’ve no idea why my mother thought it was a good idea, but for some reason I was also packed off to fencing lessons.

At one point I joined a dancing school, where they were about to stage a show including ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’. I was hastily given a part in it, although as I was a newcomer, the role was minuscule. Not that you would have known. Every mother was given her child’s costume to tart up and mine had at least ten times more ribbons and bows than the star’s did. In fact, compared to me, Shirley Temple herself would have found her outfit wanting.

It all went to my head. At the end of the performance, when we all lined up to take a bow, someone with a bouquet stepped onto the stage. I might have been stuck right at the end of the line, but I knew what I was worth! I skipped forward and said, ‘Thank you.’ They had to wrest the bouquet off me. I was in floods of tears. So that was the end of my theatrical career.

Much to my mother’s surprise, I passed the 11-plus and was offered a place at Ilford County High School, which had the reputation of being both strict and highly academic. My mother was actually so worried when she received the letter containing the Ilford High offer that she asked the Head of my primary school if she should turn it down. She really had doubts about my coping. I was bright enough, just not terribly keen on schoolwork.

The Head assured her I’d be fine there and, as it turned out, I was. I didn’t like school very much, though, particularly grammar school. It was an alien world of Latin, French and German, indoor sandals, dresses that couldn’t be more than an inch off the floor when you knelt down, and heel grips. Heel grips were as much part of the Fifties as paper nylon petticoats and headscarves worn over hair rollers on Friday nights, and your mum made you stick them in your outdoor shoes which had been bought for you to grow into.

I wasn’t a total failure. I was picked for the hockey team, showed willing by joining the fencing club and had a very nice English teacher called Miss Mackie, who didn’t seem much older than her pupils. Years later our daughter, Roberta, then 10, won a place at the City of London School for Girls. Bobby and I travelled up to the Barbican with her for her interview and when we were admitted into the Headmistress’s study, there was Miss Mackie! I seemed to grow younger and smaller by the second as I turned into Tina Dean from Christchurch Road with her heel grips and failure to appreciate the finer points of Shakespearean plays.

‘I can only hope Roberta does better than me,’ I faltered.

Miss Mackie looked at Bobby, then nudged me. ‘Oh, I think you did very well, dear,’ she said, with a bit of a wink.

Once it was confirmed that I didn’t have a glittering academic future, my mother decided to get me onto the books of a modelling agency. We went to their headquarters so they could take a look at me and we were waiting to be seen when we overheard the receptionist answering the phone. As she was taking down all the details out loud, we realized that the caller was trying to book one of the agency’s models.

‘Quick,’ hissed my mother and dragged me out into the street, where she hailed a cab and hustled me into it. The next moment, she was telling the cabbie to take us to the address we’d just heard trip off the lips of the receptionist.

When we got there, my mother announced to the client that I was the model sent by the agency. Looking a bit dubious (I was only 15), the client gave me a coat to try on. I did my best, but he received the coat back from me impassively and invited my mother to try it on. As soon as he saw her in it, he offered her the job! I think that was when my mother realized that I wasn’t going to be a star myself, so I’d better aim for the next best thing, which was to marry one.

By that time my mother had been married to Eddie, the ship’s chef, for three years. I was 11 when she first introduced him to me and at the time I liked him. I was still quite innocent and impressionable and it never crossed my mind that he was playing up to me in the hope that I’d accept him, unlike all my mother’s other suitors, which would earn him Brownie points with my mother. I think the fact that I tolerated him where I’d rejected the others probably clinched it for Eddie where my mother was concerned.

When she told me she was getting married, I was so pleased that I immediately started imagining what I’d wear and how I would look with my hair permed in a style called ‘Italian Boy’. But the evening before her wedding, I went to show her my dress, which was white with a floral print and made of paper nylon, and found her crying on the phone to her friend, Sally Lombard.

Although I’ll never know for certain, I’m convinced that she realized she was making a mistake, that she’d only agreed to marry Eddie because she was weary of Joe’s broken promises and because life as a single parent was tough and she longed for a bit of security and support. But Joe was the man she really loved and in any case, Eddie wasn’t as nice as we thought. It was only when he was wooing my mother that he tried to win me over by being as sweet as pie to me. After the wedding, we started to see the other side of him - from sweet as pie to sour as lemons. In the end he took himself off back to sea and that was the last we heard of the Dreaded Eddie.

So when my mother met Bobby, I think she thought, ‘Here’s a decent man.’ She met his parents, Doris and Bob, who had been married for ever. She saw the stable background he’d come from and she wanted that for me. She didn’t want me to re-live her life.

CHAPTER THREE
When Bobby Met Tina

My mother and I used to walk past Ilford Palais on the way to the Regal cinema and I’d look yearningly at it and think I’d never be old enough or glamorous enough to go there.

On the ceiling was a glittering, twinkling ball of mirrored mosaic, spinning and throwing off lights. The girls would put their handbags on the floor and dance round them. The cha-cha was the fashionable dance and there would be a long trail of boys and girls doing it in sync, like line-dancing. I used to think it was so adult and I longed to be part of it.

There was a Babycham bar. Babycham was the drink du jour; it was sparkly and bubbly like champagne, although actually it was made from pears. It came in tiny bottles with a Bambi on the label blowing bubbles from its mouth. You drank it from a proper champagne glass, feeling like sophistication come to life.

The Palais was packed with young people. It featured live bands like Ambrose and his Orchestra. A man called Gerry Dorsey sang with the band, but failed to achieve any great fame until he recorded a song called ‘Please Release Me’ and simultaneously had the inspired idea of changing his name to Engelbert Humperdinck.

Another of Ambrose’s singers was Kathy Kirby. She looked like Marilyn Monroe, with fabulous platinum blonde hair and glossy red lipstick and a soaring soprano voice. In the early Sixties she went on to have a huge hit called ‘Secret Love’, but in those Ilford days she and her sister, Pat, lived virtually opposite us. I’d see her in the window of her front room, wearing a satin cat suit and walking around holding the phone on a very long wire, which to me was the height of chic. Pat was quite something, too. She married Terry Clemence, who owned the Seven Kings Motor Company, and they had three daughters who all went on to make brilliant marriages, one to a viscount, the other two to lords. Not bad going for three car dealer’s girls from Essex.

I wasn’t to know then, but Pat and Terry would one day become near neighbours of Bobby and me in Chigwell. We lived it up at many a party. But that was all years into the future . . .

The big day came when I finally made it to the Palais. I’d been off school with flu since the start of the week and my mother had been trying to build up my strength with nourishing invalid breakfasts of bread in warm milk with sugar before she headed off for work. Towards the end of the week I started feeling better and concocted a plan with a school friend, Vivien Day, to go to the Palais for the lunchtime session. This started at twelve and as my mother didn’t get back from work until early evening, I knew I could get back home and into my sickbed without her being any the wiser.

That morning she treated me to the bread-and-milk as usual. Yuk. Who wants that when you’re heading for the Babycham bar? She was really worried because I only picked at it, and to tempt back my appetite left me Irish stew, my favourite, for my lunch.

The stew went untouched. Instead, Vivien and I were tremblingly shelling out 6d. each at the door of the Palais. Sixpence was the lunchtime cheap rate. In new money, it translates into the staggering sum of 2½p.

My heart was beating like a hammer as I advanced into the place that I’d dreamed of for so long. I just looked and looked. It was crowded with people of my own age, most of whom had nipped out during school lunch hour. I was particularly awestruck by the ladies’ cloakroom. The walls were panelled in rich, plum-coloured velvet. The fittings were gilt. It was lit by chandeliers. I was amazed.

When I got home, still starry-eyed, my mother was waiting for me. I’d forgotten that Thursday was her half-day. The lamb stew was thrown straight into the dustbin. As far as she was concerned, it was the most heinous thing I’d done since getting myself flashed at in Valentine’s Park. It was boarding school for me again, for all of twenty-four hours.

The Ilford Palais episode wasn’t my only covert expedition. I used to sneak up to the Two I’s with my girlfriends to see Tommy Steele, but things would hardly have started before we had to steal away at 10 pm like Cinderella. Another place we went to was Heaven and Hell, which was in a basement accessed only by some very narrow stairs. If a fire had broken out, it would have been virtually impossible to escape. But you never think of that kind of thing when you’re 15. You’re immortal.

My first boyfriend was Harry and I went out with him for six months. He was 17 and had lovely amber-coloured eyes with long eyelashes. Harry was a Mod and wore a bum-freezer jacket; he took me to haunts like the Skiffle Parlour in Ilford Lane on the back of his scooter. But that Easter I was offered a school trip to Perpignan, and my mother said, ‘I think it would be a good idea if you went on that.’ She had no time for Harry, amber eyes or not.

No sooner had she removed me from the clutches of Harry than I fell for Gilbert, the Perpignan Adonis. He played rugby for France schoolboys and was my first real crush. Cupid’s dart must have been more of a pinprick, though, because Gilbert was soon abandoned in favour of my next conquest, an actor. He can’t have been a very successful one because I’ve forgotten his name. But he had some great lines. ‘When you grow up,’ he murmured, ‘you’re going to be quite something. You must always drink champagne with a peach at the bottom of the glass.’

My suitors also included the one who arrived to pick me up in a Jag. The Jag was nearly as old as he was. When he knocked on the door, my mother opened it and said, ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’ve come to see Tina.’

My mother said, ‘Do you know how old she is? Fifteen.’

‘Well, I like them young.’ Off he went, never to be sighted again.

And then came Bobby.

‘Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own.’

It’s true. It really happened that way. The band at the Ilford Palais was playing ‘Blue Moon’ and suddenly this blond boy was in front of me, asking for a dance. Bobby always had an incredible knack of staging things to perfection.

To him, I suppose, I was a pretty girl in a lovely dress. Pat Booth, who went to the Palais at around the same time as me, said she’d catch sight of me in a boat-necked long-sleeved number and feel deeply envious - which was funny, because I used to lust after her clothes, a ‘mod’ dress, bell-skirted, with cap sleeves. I discovered later that she also went out at one point with Harry the Mod; it must have been those amber eyes. After that she went out with one Billy Walker, who was a bouncer at the Palais, though not for much longer. He was just passing through on his way to becoming the golden boy of British heavyweight boxing

Bobby would go to the Palais with some of his fellow apprentices from the West Ham ground staff. Much later I found out that he’d been watching me for weeks, stationed on the balcony but too shy to approach me. What did Bobby see in me? I spoke nicely, I’d led a sheltered life and my mother had groomed me to the best of her ability. All those elocution lessons, dancing lessons and my grammar school education had combined to turn me into what, in the late Fifties, was called ‘a nice type of girl’. I’m not sure that the fencing lessons ever came in useful, but my sense of humour did. I could make him laugh and this intense, rather inhibited football prodigy needed that.

Once you’re in a relationship, you get to know and trust the other person and then your real self starts to unfold. Bobby unfolded a lot. Even now, I have a very strong image of him as a teenager, just sitting watching me, laughing because I amused him. I was the extrovert of the partnership and that’s what he enjoyed about me. I brought him out of his shell. I could always twist things to see the funny side and although Bobby projected a public image of self-control and aloofness, he actually had a very dry wit. It was so subtle that unless you were completely attuned to him, you missed it.

When we met, I was coming up to my sixteenth birthday. He seemed a bit square at first. Because I’d grown up in such a female-dominated environment, I knew nothing about football. I wasn’t at all impressed that Bobby was a player, let alone that he had just signed professional forms with West Ham and was an England Youth international. I didn’t even realize he was a footballer at first, not a proper one who was planning to make a career out of the game.

His great heroes were Johnny Haynes, captain of England, and the Manchester United icon, Duncan Edwards, with whom he was besotted. I hadn’t a clue who he was talking about - didn’t even realize that Duncan Edwards, one of the Busby Babes, had died along with seven of his team-mates earlier that year in the Munich air crash. Duncan had been a left-half and was already established in the England side, despite his tender age. Bobby was shattered when he heard the news.

He was much more taken with me than I was with him in the early stages. After that first dance I agreed to meet him at the Palais the following Saturday - then I stood him up. He waited all evening for me.

I’d told him I liked going to the record store, so he took to lurking around there in the hope that I’d walk in, but the most he would get from me was a little nod of acknowledgement. Even so, something about him must have made an impression because I told my mother about him. That was when Fate took a hand. One day, my mother and I were sitting in the back of a taxi as it crawled along Ilford High Street in the traffic when I happened to glance out of the window. There he was, sitting in a coffee bar. ‘That’s him!’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s the boy who asked me out.’

My mother leaned across me to get a better view. ‘Mm, he looks nice,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you invite him home for tea?’

Our first date took place the evening after his second game for the West Ham first team. Bobby had made his first team debut at Upton Park when West Ham, newly promoted to the top flight, had beaten Manchester United 3-2. Bobby, only brought into the side because senior players were unfit, had been brilliant. He dominated the following day’s back page headlines.

It was actually a bitter-sweet moment for Bobby when he got his first team chance, because his rival for the Number Six shirt was Malcolm Allison, who had been Bobby’s mentor and idol since Bobby joined the club as a schoolboy. For most of 1958, they had both been fighting to get out of the reserves, Bobby because he was knocking on the door to his future, Malcolm because he was trying to prove he could still play after a spell in a sanatorium recovering from TB.

Malcolm was thirteen and a half years older than Bobby. Very tall, big-shouldered and handsome, he was a man, whereas Bobby was a boy. He had a slightly sardonic air and sometimes he could be cutting. It would be a while before he developed his twin reputations as fedora-wearing, cigar-smoking playboy and brilliant, flamboyant, big-spending coach, but even then he had panache. More than that, he could tell greatness in the raw. As one of thirteen colts on the ground staff at Upton Park, Bobby had been widely regarded as ordinary, but Malcolm saw something in him that others at the club didn’t and set about coaching him. For that alone, Bobby adored him.

So Bobby’s first-team debut brought mixed feelings. He was thrilled, but sorry it had happened because of Malcolm’s illness. Malcolm, for his part, didn’t bear a grudge. Bobby was his favourite son. Who better to replace him?

Five days after Bobby’s dream debut, the complete opposite happened against Nottingham Forest. He had a terrible game, with the huge crowd shouting to the Forest players, ‘Play on the left-half, that’s the weak link.’ West Ham lost 4-0. Bobby bought an evening paper at Nottingham station and the report on his performance was so damning that he tore it up. He hadn’t any inkling that the last thing I’d be interested in was the football results.

Anyway, I had my own cross to bear. Having spent all afternoon preparing for our date and having my hair specially set for the occasion, I went to meet him at King’s Cross. In those days it was a sooty Victorian edifice with iron gates controlling access to the platforms and huge steam engines fuelled by coal. When I heard the familiar grinding of the wheels and saw Bobby’s train chugging to a stop, I decided to position myself where the steam gently wafted from the engine. I had visions of the mist slowly lifting and me emerging like the mysterious heroine of a romantic movie into a bedazzled Bobby’s path. Sadly, that was not to be. The steam had other ideas and I came out looking like orphan Annie, with the hair that had been so carefully coiffed hanging limp and damp round my forlorn face.

I did think Bobby was great-looking, of course. He didn’t have spots - well, occasionally a couple, but only very, very small ones. He was a terrific dancer; whatever he did, he had to be Mr Perfect. We used to kiss in time to the music. It was heady stuff! Looking back, though, it was so innocent.

The reason I found him a bit square was probably that he’d led a very disciplined life compared to most boys in the Fifties. He and the amber-eyed Harry were around the same age, but Bobby seemed not much more than a baby, really.

Doris was the dominant figure in the Moore marriage and in Bobby’s childhood, and she was fiercely protective of him. She called him ‘My Robert’. She was a very strong character and I think she recognized a similar strength in me. It was a while before we had a relaxed, easy relationship. In contrast, I got on immediately with Bobby’s dad, Big Bob. He was a gas-fitter and came from Poplar. He was much more Cockney than Doris, was prematurely bald and liked clowning around and wearing silly hats. His childhood had been tough - he lost his father in World War One - but he was a lovely, kind man with a wonderful twinkle in his eye. He was straight-talking with it, though. He would tell you if he thought you were wrong.

In some ways Doris, who was always known as Doss, was a bit of a rebel by her family’s standards. Most of them were Salvation Army. They used to go out on a Sunday carrying the Good Book, singing the hymns and wearing the bonnets - the whole ten yards, in fact. Maybe Doss started off by going with them but decided it wasn’t for her - she was an independent-minded individual. Even so, she and Big Bob were very upright, God-fearing people.

Their terraced house in Waverley Gardens had a front fence where Big Bob always chained his bike. The first time I stayed round there, I was put in the box room. Doss cornered me there. ‘Any girl,’ she said, ‘who gets My Robert into trouble will have me to deal with.’

My mother was absolutely furious when I told her. Floored, livid and silent with rage. But she soon recovered her powers of speech. ‘You weren’t brought up to be a floozy!’ she gasped.

She was right. I was an innocent. Bobby and I did our courting in the pre-pill era. A girl I had been to school with died after a back-street abortion. I read about it in the local paper and felt horrified and frightened. But Doss’s words hung over me. I never got Her Robert into trouble.

Neither Doss nor Big Bob smoked or drank alcohol and Bobby realized that my mother was much more worldly and sophisticated than them. When the time came for him to introduce them to the mother of the girl he loved, he bought gin and wine for them to serve. Meanwhile, my mother had realized that Doss and Bob Moore were teetotallers. Wanting to make a good impression, she said, ‘I’d love a cup of tea’ when Doss asked her what she would have.

Equally beside herself to impress, Doss came back with, ‘Cow’s milk, sterilized or condensed?’ It became a running joke between Bobby and me whenever anyone asked what we’d like to drink.

Actually, Doss could never accept that Bobby could put away a lager or four. If he’d had too many, she’d say he was ‘under the weather’. Quite a few years later, one Christmas after Bobby and I were married, he and a lot of the other West Ham lads went out at lunchtime to celebrate the festive season. Christmas Eve always seemed to be a bit of a nightmare for me. There’d been a couple of times earlier when the turkey, West Ham’s annual Christmas present, would go walkabout instead of coming home. Each time it would be spotted sitting on the bar, with Bobby ordering a lager for himself ‘and a gin and tonic for the bird’. They’d eventually find their way home with the turkey propped up in the front seat.

On this particular occasion, Bobby and I were due to go to a function in the West End that night but by mid-afternoon, when he and the turkey still hadn’t made it home, I began ringing round all his known haunts. Eventually I tracked him down to the Globe in Stepney and reminded him about the function.

‘I’ll be home in twenty minutes,’ he said.

I waited for an hour, then rang again. ‘Don’t worry,’ said my increasingly merry husband, ‘I’ll finish my drink and be on my way.’

So I waited another hour, then rang again. ‘If you don’t come home right now, I’ll tell your parents to come and get you,’ I said.

Even that didn’t flush him out, so I carried out my threat. Doss and Big Bob duly set out for the Globe, where they advanced on him from the rear. Doss laid a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Home, son.’

‘Mum,’ said Bobby as they escorted him out, ‘I’m 31.’

Doss turned and said to the assembled company, ‘He isn’t usually like this, you know. He’s been under the weather lately.’

Bobby was their only child, and Doss and Big Bob adored him. He was Mr Perfect, their reason for being. The only bad thing he’d ever done was pee in a milk bottle - disgusting! Doss was involved in everything Bobby did, from supporting him at every single match he played in to washing, bleaching and scrubbing his laces with a nailbrush to make sure they stayed sparkling white, then ironing them.

It was Big Bob and Doss who took me to Upton Park for my first visit. I’d never been to a match before and I couldn’t believe the number of people there. We sat in D Block with all the other players’ families, behind the Directors Box, and Doss barely took her eyes off Bobby the whole game. She kept shouting, ‘Unload him! Unload him!’ I thought it was a technical term.

Doss had been very pretty as a girl; she’d won a beauty contest and you could see who Bobby got his looks from. Our daughter, Roberta, has inherited her lovely nose. And she was a very good woman: unaffected, modest, generous to those she loved, and natural. But she was a Scorpio and a typical one in some ways. She would harbour grudges. If anyone said anything bad about Her Robert, that would be it for them. They’d be completely cut out, for good and all time.

It wasn’t just her looks that were handed down to Bobby. A lot of his personality traits, like his repressed, uptight side, came from her, too. They were both strict with themselves, both terribly disciplined, almost obsessively immaculate. Even after a late, lager-fuelled night, Bobby would get a clothes brush out and brush his whole suit down before turning in. Everything he did had to be faultless, and that was his mother’s way too.

She used to cut and edge little ‘Vs’ in the side of his shorts just the way he liked them, so naturally when I leapt onto the scene I decided that that was going to be my job from then on. The first time I did it, they split all the way up to the waist during a match, so the first time was also the last. Doss got her job back. My Vs just didn’t cut the mustard.

I also discovered she was a wonderful knitter, so I embarked on making Bobby a hideous green V-neck sweater. I did aspire, but she set such a terribly high standard. Whenever I ate round at Waverley Gardens, she would serve the mashed potato in exact half-moon shapes, using an ice cream scoop. The cuffs and collars of Bobby’s shirts were always as smooth as glass. She’d never rush anything as crucial as the ironing. But as I’ve said, she and Big Bob were good people, and Doss was a little wounded and put out when Bobby fell in love with me. She felt he’d excluded her from his life. But again, that was Bobby - he only ever had one passion at a time. He met me and that was it. He was absolutely besotted.

Bobby also realized that his mum was possessive and he rebelled against that to a certain degree. It wasn’t that he cut any ties with his parents. Once we were married, we constantly went round on visits. He was never derogatory about them. It was just that the intimacy, the sense of having one single, special person you shared your world with, had been transferred to me. He shut off from Doss emotionally. It must have hurt.

Bobby might have been young and a bit square, but he was very romantic and he had exquisite taste. He would send me flowers and place little billets doux under my pillow or in the pocket of my coat. He also had good design and technical skills; if the football hadn’t worked out for him, he’d planned to train as a draughtsman. Once, when I was away for a few days, he redecorated my bedroom as a surprise. He turned a little filing cabinet into a jewellery box and re-upholstered the tub chair in red satin with black buttons. It probably sounds horrendous, but it looked gorgeous.

He was also very generous. I would receive complete outfits as a surprise. Once, after I had admired what my friend Anita Barker was wearing, he phoned her to ask her to get something similar for me. He even bought a dress off her back once. By the time he went with England to play France, his taste was developing nicely. I received a pink suit, navy blue blouse with pussy-cat bow and a Paco Rabanne chain mail bag.

When I was 17, we went on holiday to Italy - separate bedrooms, of course - where he presented me with a skirt and paper nylon petticoat he’d just bought. For all his macho credentials as a footballer, in some ways he was one of the most untypical men I would ever meet. Later on, after we were married, he used to help me do my hair and I’d sit there thinking, ‘If only the fans could see him now. The captain of England is bleaching my roots.’ He loved going shopping and - even more bizarre - he actually liked shopping for clothes with me. That isn’t a job for the faint-hearted.

I’d left school by then to start my job as a junior secretary at the Prudential Assurance Company in Holborn. Every evening when Bobby wasn’t playing, he’d come up to meet me. I saw him every night bar Fridays, when he had to prepare for the match the next day. That was the night I could catch up on my girlie things and drive my mother mad because I’d monopolize the phone, talking to him for hours. He was shy and unsure of himself but he was determined to succeed in football and determined to have me. He already had nicknames for me - he called me Pet or Teen or, later, Percy, which was usually shortened to Perce. But I liked it best when he called me My Princess, and he certainly treated me as one.

One of our haunts was Sheekey’s fish restaurant in the West End, which I introduced him to. It was my mother’s favourite and I’d often gone there with her; we’d eat steamed Dover sole with lobster sauce and gaze at the Beverly Sisters, who were regulars there. Joy, Teddy and Babs were then at the peak of their fame as the British answer to America’s Andrews Sisters. Joy, a tall, lovely, slightly toothy blonde, went on to marry Billy Wright, England football captain of the Fifties. They were the Posh ‘n’ Becks of their day!

For Bobby and me, going to the Spaghetti House in Soho was a big deal, too. Neither of us had ever tried spaghetti before. It was fun trying to master the art of twirling the fork, although of course Mister Get-it-right-or-forget-it watched and observed how it was done before attempting a mouthful. We had a bottle of chianti in a straw basket and thought how sophisticated we were.

That night, on the way back through the West End, we found a shop selling little glass animals. It was still open and Bobby went inside and bought one for me. ‘I love you,’ he said. For the first time.

In a romantic daze, we missed the last bus from the station. I thought he’d be irritated, having to walk me home then get himself back to Waverley Gardens.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said at the front door of Christchurch Road. ‘I’ll turn it into a training jog.’

‘What, to burn off the spaghetti?’

‘Yeah. Anyhow, I’m so happy I don’t care about missing the bus. Goodnight, Princess.’

Silly, but sweet and true.

CHAPTER FOUR
And Big Mal Came Too

Our romance progressed more smoothly than Bobby’s football career at first. As a result of the disastrous game at Nottingham in September 1958 he was dropped by West Ham’s manager of the time, Ted Fenton, and didn’t become a first team regular until the 1960-61 season after the first-choice defender, John Smith, was sold to Spurs.

Boosted by Bobby’s new-found career stability, we got engaged on Christmas Day, 1960. Bobby was 19 and I was 17. Naturally, the proposal was planned and carried out in style. He’d even asked my mother’s permission beforehand. That meant she knew what was in that big parcel, with my name on it and tied up with a huge bow, that I had been prodding expectantly ever since it had appeared a few days earlier under the Christmas tree in Christchurch Road.

We were due to go that night to a party at Nanny Wilde’s, as we always did at Christmas, but I had a terrible cold and wasn’t really looking forward to it for once.

‘My nose is red,’ I complained to Bobby, ‘and besides, I haven’t got anything to wear.’

Bobby grinned, then picked up the parcel and placed it in my arms. When I opened it, I found a brown and black check mohair skirt and a mohair jumper.

‘I want you to wear those,’ Bobby said, ‘when you put on what’s inside that.’ He pointed to another box, a very small one, nestled in the folds of the outfit. I opened up the small box and inside was a ring with one lovely, perfect diamond.

Half-joking, Bobby went down on one knee. ‘Tina, I’d like us to get married.’

My cold miraculously cured, Bobby and I went off to Nanny Wilde’s in Cranbrook Road, me flashing my engagement ring and wearing the mohair outfit despite the fact that it made me look ever so slightly like the Michelin Man.

When we got there, it was to find Nanny Wilde none too pleased because my cousin Danny, Aunt Glad’s son and a trainee plumber, had brought round a crowd of his mates from East Ham, uninvited. One of the mates was his best friend David, who had dreams of making it as a celebrity photographer. I vaguely remembered David asking me, two years previously, if I’d let him take some photos of me in Epping Forest. My mother, deeply suspicious of his quite innocent motives, had said, ‘Over my dead body.’ If she hadn’t guarded my virtue so closely, I would now be able to boast of owning a set of portraits of me as a 15-year-old by David Bailey.

By the time we got engaged, Bobby was experiencing his first full season in the first team. For this he was paid £8 a week, which these days wouldn’t buy a cheap Alice band for David Beckham. At the time, players were still paid according to the Football League’s notorious maximum wage limit of £20 a week during the season and £17 a week in the summer lay-off. That didn’t change until 1961, when Jimmy Hill, then a Fulham player and chairman of the Professional Footballers Association, forced through its abolition after threatening a players’ strike.

To give an example of how comparatively low footballers’ wages were, Bobby’s £8 a week was £3 less than I was earning at the Pru, so you could say that I was the breadwinner. Most of our money went into saving like mad for our first home, but life was still a lot of fun. We’d go round in a crowd with the other young West Ham players, like Alan Sealey and Tony Scott, and their girlfriends - Janice, who went out with Alan, was that year’s Miss Dagenham and very glamorous. After games we’d go to a private club, Harlene, in Forest Gate, where we girls drank Bristol Cream sherry because we thought it was genteel. Then we’d move on to Room At The Top. Another local hotspot was the Dick Turpin, the place to be on Thursday nights. There we’d bump into other young players like Terry Venables and Brian Dear. We used to keep the bar open, but the owners loved us because we were such good customers.

By then, Bobby had bought his first car, a red Ford Zephyr. It was such a momentous occasion that I can still remember its registration number: 2394 PU. A friend of my mother’s sold it to him and he paid for it in cash. The transaction took place in Lyons Tea Shop in Ilford, where we had our usual fruit bun with two pats of butter, a bowl of tomato soup and a cup of tea. Bobby arrived with the money in a paper bag. Naturally he had sorted the bills out into denominations first, from pound notes to fifties. They were all in piles facing the right way up and secured with elastic bands. I think he fell short in one way, though - they weren’t arranged in numbered sequence.

Bobby loved that Ford Zephyr. It shone, it was immaculate. It was the beginning of his love affair with cars, especially red ones. He was determined to get a Jaguar as soon as he could afford one.

As Bobby became a bit more established in the West Ham team, older players besides Malcolm Allison began to accept him. Chief among them were Johnny Bond and Noel Cantwell. Johnny was known as ‘Muffin’ after a puppet who featured on a children’s TV programme, Muffin the Mule. Johnny was alleged to have a kick like the said creature. Noel was nicknamed ‘Sausage’, which was short for sausage roll and thus meant to rhyme with Noel. Oh, but he was gorgeous. I loved Noel.

Bobby was ravenous for football knowledge and worldly wisdom, so he loved it when the older men included him. He almost sat at their feet. In the first flush of his romance with me, he looked up to them. They represented what he wanted to be.

Malcolm Allison lived a social whirl and during this time he was friendly with a fishmonger’s daughter. Bobby and I were invited round to the fishmonger’s house one New Year’s Eve and after sampling it for the first time in his life, Bobby devoured an entire side of smoked salmon on his own.

It was, after all, the start of the Sixties, when the more luxurious kinds of food were just becoming available after the dreary diet and relative deprivation of the postwar period. We were getting a taste of melon, avocado, French cheese and Italian wine at last. Even broccoli was an exotic luxury to Bobby, as it was to most people in that era. Up to the time I met him, his mum never dished up any vegetables other than the standard staples of those days: peas, cabbage and potatoes.

My mother was very indulgent to me in all sorts of ways, but one thing she was almost draconian about was table manners, as I knew to my cost. When I was young, should I offend, I was despatched from the table. Bobby, who was dazzled by her, set enthusiastically about brushing up his style. He so wanted to be correct in everything he did. He also began to be aware of formal etiquette that he hadn’t experienced before, but he really watched and learnt. He was naturally polite and courteous, but now he was adding polish to his manner.

Soon we graduated from the Spaghetti House in Soho. Our next discovery was the 21 Club. Johnny Haynes, Bobby’s old childhood hero, introduced us to that. Not only was Johnny very attractive, he had a great personality. He was set to become part of football history - the first player to earn £100. He was captain of England from 1960 to August 1962, when a car accident put him out of the game for a year. It would have made a poignant twist in the tale if Bobby had been his direct replacement as captain, but Jimmy Armfield had a short spell in the job first.

Johnny was also the prototype one-club man. He went on to stay with Fulham for all eighteen years of his career, even though he could have made fortunes more if he had accepted all the opportunities offered to him by other, higher-placed clubs. He was commercially shrewd, though, taking advantage of his brooding, Italianate, Forties film star looks to become an early icon for Brylcreem - with his trademark dark, slicked back hair, he obviously believed in the product he endorsed.

He was a regular at the 21 Club. This was really elegant and exclusive, although the diners sometimes fell short of expectations. Johnny ordered an amazing starter for the three of us - a large silver bowl lined with ice and so full of prawns that they hung over the edge. The prawns were so utterly delicious that as soon as I started eating them, I just got carried away. The next thing I knew, I was looking down at a mountain of empty shells. I couldn’t believe I’d eaten so many. I was overcome with remorse. ‘Were they very expensive?’ I stammered to Johnny.

‘Enormously,’ said Johnny. ‘They’re so expensive they have to charge by the prawn.’

‘Oh no,’ I gasped. ‘How do they know how many you’ve eaten?’

‘They count the shells and tails,’ said Johnny.

Quickly, I emptied the shells and tails into my handbag. Bobby and Johnny kept straight faces. I had no idea they were winding me up - and did they pull my leg afterwards!

1962 was a big year for us. Bobby turned 21 in April, made his England debut in May and married me in June.

Getting his first full England cap wasn’t completely unexpected. He had been doing well in the England Under-23s, which was managed by Ron Greenwood, now his manager at West Ham. Ron was also a good friend of Walter Winterbottom, England team manager at the time, and had been singing Bobby’s praises.

In those days it was traditional to have an England v Young England fixture the night before the Cup Final, and Bobby was pleased with how he’d played because there was still a chance of him making the squad for the 1962 World Cup in Chile. But he’d heard nothing and was resigning himself to go with the rest of the West Ham squad on their close season trip to Africa. Then Ron called him into his office at Upton Park. ‘You won’t be going on the Africa trip,’ he said.

Bobby was startled. He thought he’d done something to offend Ron. Then he saw that Ron was smiling broadly. ‘You’re off to Chile instead,’ he added.

I was absolutely delighted for Bobby. I knew how much it meant to him just to be selected. He warned me not to get my hopes up on his behalf. ‘The chances are I’m only there to make up the numbers in training,’ he said, ‘but at least it’ll be good experience for the future.’ In fact, he became a fixture in the team from the first match, making his England debut against Peru on 20 May. He was bowled over and so was I. It’s every young footballer’s dream, and here he was, the man I was about to marry, fulfilling that dream.

Bobby’s absence on England duty also gave me the space I needed to organize our wedding with the help of my mother. I’d managed to save around £100 and ended up spending the lot on my wedding dress and accessories. Before the wedding, I had a perm. According to dear mama, it wasn’t curly enough, so I was despatched back to the hairdresser to have it re-done. My hair was fine on the day, although later, on honeymoon, Bobby and I had an argument that he won by ducking me in the sea. When I surfaced, I had an Afro.

We were married on 30 June 1962 at St Clement’s, Ilford. Noel Cantwell was best man and the Dreaded Eddie gave me away. I wish my mother had given me away herself. After all, she had been mother and father to me, she had always been there for me and it was a shame that a man who had come into my life relatively late ended up taking the limelight.

When we arrived at the church after the customary slight delay, I was amazed at the crowd of well-wishers, as well as all the reporters and photographers waiting to preserve the bridegroom in his navy mohair suit, white shirt and silk tie for posterity. If I’m honest, I suppose I was rather excited to see them there. All the West Ham team were there and after the ceremony we walked out of the church under an arch of football boots. People plied us with England and West Ham banners along with the more traditional blue garters and black cats. The reception was at the Valentine’s public house in Gants Hill. We opened the dancing with ‘Blue Moon’ - what else?

Afterwards, we were chauffeured to the airport by Budgie Byrne, one of the West Ham lads Bobby used to go gambolling through the night with. It was a wild drive and after being thrown around in the back all the way from Ilford to Heathrow, I staggered into the Skyline Hotel battered and bruised. Bobby and I were starving, so we had beef sandwiches and a pot of tea. I had a white nylon nightie and negligee trimmed with blue daises - looking back, they were revolting. The next day, I changed into my going away outfit, a red Polly Peck suit with a pleated skirt that I’d bought in a sale. Eat your heart out, Victoria Beckham.

We’d booked our honeymoon in Majorca, the Isle of Love. Coincidentally, Malcolm Allison and Noel Cantwell were due to be in Majorca at the same time as us, as my mother was horrified to find out at our wedding reception. ‘Look, Tina’s only young,’ she said, taking Malcolm’s arm and drawing him to one side. ‘I really do think it would be better if you didn’t make any contact with her and Bobby on their honeymoon.’

Malcolm nodded solemnly. A few minutes later, I overheard him telling Bobby, ‘I’ve booked the Astor Club for later.’

It was like a knife through my heart, until I realized he was only joking! Malcolm was a tease.

But my mother was one hundred per cent right about the honeymoon. She knew it would be a disaster if Malcolm and Noel showed their faces in Majorca, because they always led Bobby astray. True to form, they showed up within a week. The three of them got plastered. Bobby was violently sick and spent the night in Noel’s room and I ended up sobbing with his wife, Maggie. Can you imagine being on your honeymoon and ending up in bed with the best man’s wife while the best man and your husband of one week are together down the corridor?

After we returned home to Gants Hill, Bobby bought me a Hillman Minx for £100, and a Siamese cat. We called it Pele and it quickly became famous when it attacked John Bond. It was a real hard cat, was Pele.

Our first home was a three-bedroomed terrace house in Glenwood Gardens. We’d wanted a slightly grander one nearby but couldn’t stretch to the extra £600. It was a shame Brylcreem didn’t seek out Bobby’s services earlier. Later that year they paid him £450 to appear, with strangely tamped down curls, on an advertising poster. That was a one-off, quite possibly because, unlike Johnny Haynes, Bobby was not a credible Brylcreem man. He didn’t have the kind of hair you could slick back. No Brylcreem jar ever graced the bathroom shelf at Glenwood Gardens.

The house had French doors at the back which opened onto a pretty garden where Bobby and I planted a magnolia tree - our favourite. Indoors, the lounge had a green carpet patterned with pink roses and a plate rail going round the walls where we put Bobby’s memorabilia.

We were especially proud of our hostess trolley. One Christmas morning, after I’d prepared the turkey and all the trimmings, we went to a drinks party where we met up with our friend Lou Wade. Lou was 6ft 6in tall, thin and Jewish, and he adored Bobby so much that he followed him all over the world. He wore really outlandish clothes and was noted for his garish check jackets, but he was very definitely not a spiv, just an enormous character - his children went to top public schools and his wife was a lady. He used to laugh standing on one leg and he would wind the other leg around it like a snake because he was so tall.

By the time we got back from the Christmas drinks party, Bobby and I were a little bit ‘under the weather’ and when we went to push the hostess trolley plus contents into the dining room, everything shot onto the floor. We picked up what was salvageable, then rang Lou. ‘Bring it round here,’ he said, so we had Christmas dinner chez Lou Wade that year.

I suppose that, by today’s standards, our Gants Hill house was pretty modest, but Bobby had previously lived in a small house close to an industrial site and I’d had a flat with an outside loo, so to us it was fantastic. Even so, I found the first year of our marriage a bit uncomfortable. It took a long time to adjust to such a huge change in my life. Bobby didn’t want me to work, because he trained in the mornings only and came home for lunch. In those days, the close season started in May and stretched on until well into August, so we could get away for lovely long summer holidays. But I missed the company and stimulation of working life at first.

In so many ways, Bobby was a paragon among husbands - I never had to tidy up after him. Not only immaculately dressed, he was also obsessively neat. He just had to arrange everything in order and just so. The clothes in his wardrobe were lined up as though they had been prepared for inspection. His jumpers were hung in sequence from dark to light. It was almost an aesthetic pleasure to open the wardrobe. Something I did find difficult about those early days, though, was that Bobby had been cosseted by his parents, whether it was Big Bob cleaning his muddy boots for him on a Saturday night after the game or Doss’s five-star ironing and sewing service. But the incident of the sub-standard Vs in his shorts should have been a warning to me. I had trouble coming up to Doss’s standards.

In my own way, I’d been equally spoilt. My mother felt guilty about leaving me to go to work every day and I’d usually be treated to breakfast in bed before she set off. I never ironed. I hadn’t really learnt to cook, either, although as my family always ate well, at least I knew how things ought to taste.

After I’d been married for six months, I solved the problem of the ironing. Sometimes I’d visit West Ham to help out in Bobby’s sports goods shop. My mother had given up her job as manageress of a large clothes shop to run it for him. It was opposite the stadium in Green Street and one day I took a wander up the road and discovered a Chinese laundry. That was the end of my ironing angst - I just took everything there from then on. I never let on to Doss, though.

It wasn’t only the housework which got me down. In that first year of marriage, Bobby’s England career began to take off big time. That, plus his West Ham commitments, meant he was often away. I felt isolated because I’d been used to the warmth and security of Christchurch Road, with Auntie Mum, Uncle Jim and my three cousins, Marlene, Jenny and Jimmy, just a flight of stairs away.

A while before I got married, Auntie Mum and her family had moved to Barkingside, so I reverted to the bosom of my family, driving round there in my Hillman Minx, Pele in his cat basket beside me. It meant I could spend time with my cousin Jimmy, to whom I’d always been close. Although Jimmy wasn’t much older than me, he was now more or less housebound. He had been doing his National Service when he came home for a spell on leave and started staggering when he walked. Soon he couldn’t even carry his bike indoors. Uncle Jim thought he was malingering because he didn’t want to go back to the Army, but the reality was much, much worse; he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Jimmy suffered from a particularly virulent form of the disease and he wasn’t with us for much longer. After he died, Bobby helped me to organize an auction of West Ham and England autographed memorabilia, which made enough to buy and adapt a transport van for MS sufferers to use, so at least Jimmy’s death resulted in some benefit to others.

It was after the World Cup in Chile that Bobby’s fame really started to spread. By the end of 1962, Walter Winter-bottom had decided to stand down as England manager and Alf Ramsey, who replaced him, made it clear from very early on that he saw Bobby as his future captain. Alf was quiet, self-controlled and introverted. He also knew exactly what he wanted and I think he saw his mirror image in Bobby. England’s first game under Alf was against France in the European Championships. England were beaten 5-2, but Bobby came back full of the joys because Alf had actually sat down next to him as the team bus was leaving Paris. ‘He was asking me all sorts of questions about the team under Walter and where I thought I should play,’ marvelled Bobby. ‘I get the idea he’s really going to sort things out.’

In spite of the fact that Bobby was young and relatively new to the team, Alf made him captain within a few months of that France defeat, against Czechoslovakia on 12 May 1963 - Bobby’s twelfth cap. Bobby revelled in leading the side out in front of the fanatically partisan crowd in Bratislava. England won 4-2 and the big occasion inspired him to a performance that brought rave reviews from the English press.

I had to wrestle with my feelings about Bobby’s increasing fame. On the one hand I was thrilled for him that things were going so well. On the other hand, now everybody wanted to be Bobby Moore’s friend. That was a little difficult to deal with at first. Before we got married, we’d been an ordinary courting couple. Having the press at our wedding and all those strangers crowding around to wish us well had been lovely, but beyond that it really hadn’t occurred to me that we’d be in the public eye all the time and what that would entail.

I’d been used to having Bobby to myself more or less one hundred per cent and, naively, thought that was how it would continue. Now the hangers-on were starting to appear. I was actually quite taken aback when we kept getting interrupted while we were out for a quiet dinner.

Through friends we met one Stanley Flashman, king of ticket touts and future owner of Barnet FC, where he achieved legendary status by employing Barry Fry as manager, then sacking and re-instating him almost on a weekly basis at one stage. Stan’s industrial-sized figure made him instantly recognizable. He would come up with tickets and backstage passes to all the top shows and introduce us to a whole host of people who then invited us to parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs . . . you name it. Some of those events were great. Others, where it would turn out that Bobby was the prize exhibit and used for photo opportunities, were a pain. He caught on to it soon enough. He hated letting people down and was never, ever abrupt or rude, but he had a way of withdrawing behind a wall of politeness if necessary.

I loved the real fans. They were wonderful. What I didn’t like was the idea of Bobby being exploited by people for their own benefit, or used and taken advantage of. I was protective of him. In fact, we had an understanding: when it got too much for him, he would give me a special look. Very soon after, I would rush up to him and say, ‘Oh! Bobby, don’t forget we’ve got to . . .’ and then produce some fictitious commitment which meant we had to leave tout de suite. Then we would head off somewhere where we knew we wouldn’t be disturbed, like the White Elephant Club. Bobby’s party trick there was to stand behind the bar, seemingly innocuously. It was only if you looked behind the bar that you would see he had his trousers down.

Totally out of character for the dignified, self-controlled Bobby Moore? Not a bit of it. It’s a thing young men do. It wasn’t even terribly naughty. Mind you, he did keep his boxer shorts on.

It was around this time, incidentally, that Bobby’s existence was noted by the world of high fashion. The September 1962 issue of Vogue pictured him in his West Ham strip, surrounded by four gorgeous models. The rest of the world was discovering what I already knew - that Bobby Moore was beautiful as well as brilliant. And soon he would prove that he was brave as well.

CHAPTER FIVE
A Light Grey

Bobby’s yelp of pain jerked me wide awake. Slowly, because I was heavily pregnant, I sat up and switched on the lamp. ‘Bobby, what’s the matter?’ I said.

I already had the answer. Lying next to me, he was doubled up. I went cold with fear. ‘Please, Bobby, you can’t leave it any longer,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to get it seen.’

It was November 1964. Bobby’s career was on a roll. Earlier in the year, he had been elected Footballer of the Year by the Football Writers Association and two days after accepting the award, he had led West Ham to their first FA Cup victory at Wembley. We were expecting our first child in January and both of us were absolutely thrilled at the prospect. And then this.

He had noticed the lump in his testicle a few weeks earlier. The discovery had alarmed him and he’d mentioned it to the club physio, but between them they decided it was a sports injury, caused when someone kicked him in a tender place during training. It would probably disappear of its own accord in a couple of weeks. Until then, it wasn’t worth bothering the doctor. But it didn’t disappear. Instead, it became more and more painful until, turning over in bed that night and jarring it with the extra weight of my pregnant body, I put him in agony. Something was obviously badly wrong.

The next morning, at the GP’s surgery, we saw our family doctor. Dr Kennedy was one of life’s true gentlemen and a dedicated physician who really pulled out all the stops for us. Instead of going home to Gants Hill with me, Bobby was sent straight to the London Hospital. Within twenty-four hours, he was on the operating table.

As soon as he came round, he had a nurse ring me up. She handed him the phone. ‘I just want to tell you, I love you,’ he said.

I sighed with relief. I’d had such a horrible, despondent feeling about the operation. ‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ I thought.

When I went to visit him at the hospital that evening, I expected to be told he’d be well enough to come home within a few days. I hadn’t even got as far as Bobby’s bed when the consultant called me into his office. ‘I’m afraid we found cancer,’ he said.

The consultant’s name was Mr Tresidder. I questioned the poor man over and over and he did his best to comfort and reassure me. ‘There are all kinds of tumours,’ he said.

’They come in all shades from grey to black, and Bobby’s was a light grey.’

I tried to concentrate on what he was telling me, but I was so frightened for Bobby that I could barely make sense of the words. In that situation, you don’t hear anything except the word you don’t want to hear. Cancer, cancer, cancer.

‘Don’t tell Bobby that’s what it is,’ I begged him.

From the beginning to the end of his treatment, Bobby and I never once mentioned the C word. I kept on asking the consultant questions; I must have driven him to distraction. I also went to the library and read up as much as I could about it, although the books weren’t very informative. I wanted to know every angle, every possibility. Most of all, I didn’t want Bobby to know. I thought it would really crush him and badly affect his chances of recovery.

Looking back, Bobby must have realized what was wrong with him. He wasn’t stupid and besides, he had great courage. Even if Mr Tresidder had skirted round the issue, I’m convinced that Bobby would have put two and two together and pressed him for the truth. What’s more, not only do I think he was aware what the problem was but I’m pretty sure he’d made a mental vow not to disclose it to me because he wanted to protect me. All he said to me about it was, ‘Don’t tell anyone what I’m in here for.’

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